It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, as it always should be in Oriole Park, in the shadow of the B&O warehouse at Camden Yards. After all, it was the framework that transformed professional sports like few other forces ever have, synergizing the team and the city and making the venue the star attraction.
That happened in 1992, the year before Peter Angelos, a prominent trial lawyer, bought his hometown Orioles. The team has risen (but never to the World Series) and fallen (often quite far) in the decades since, and now it’s reaching its peak again. Peter, 94, is retired and his son John, 56, is the team’s managing partner. John sat in the home dugout one recent afternoon while the visiting Mets took batting practice, stopping occasionally to greet people by name.
Clubhouse manager Fred Tyler, whose family has been with the team since moving from St. Louis in 1954, received a warm hello. So did star rookie Grayson Rodriguez, who helped the Orioles rise to the top of the American League East. Angelos had already chatted with Buck Showalter — the former Baltimore manager who now runs the wealthy but hapless Mets — and would soon entertain members of the Orioles’ last championship team, from 1983, in a suite overlooking the empire.
“Remember the context,” Kurt Schmoke, Baltimore mayor from 1987 to 1999, said afterwards during the game, a runaway victory for the Orioles. “We had lost the Colts and there were concerns about the economics of professional sports and whether the Orioles could be lured. So the governor and the stadium authority committed to building here, which boosted people’s morale and made everyone in the community very proud to be sort of the leaders of the new generation of stadiums. baseball, the new generation of sports. »
The model has changed, and that’s why Angelos, often reclusive, is eager to speak. Unlike the NFL’s Ravens, who play in the parking lot and signed a lease deal in January through 2037, the Orioles haven’t officially committed to their long-term future here. Simply signing an extension would unlock roughly $600 million in state-funded improvements, but Angelos has bigger ambitions.
That might make some fans nervous, given the frustrations of the past three decades.
Peter Angelos was often heavily involved in baseball operations and the on-field product suffered; the Orioles had the third-worst winning percentage in the sport between 1998 and 2011. John Angelos delegated baseball decisions to a forward-thinking general manager, Mike Elias, but the recent suspension of a broadcaster on the Orioles cable network highlighted at least some level. of organizational dysfunction.
Angelos said the team was reviewing the internal processes that resulted in the discipline of broadcaster Kevin Brown, who simply pointed out on air that the Orioles had a history of struggling mightily in home games. away against the Tampa Bay Rays. Angelos said he hopes Brown stays with the team for a long time. “Nothing like this will happen again,” he added. “This shouldn’t have happened even once.”
For his part, Brown posted a series of messages on X, formerly known as Twitter, several weeks after the news leaked, saying the situation was “mischaracterized” and saying he had a “wonderful relationship” with the team. The messages sparked many skeptical responses online before Brown returned to the team’s broadcast booth.
The broadcast issue caught the team’s attention, and Angelos said he regretted it as well. He generally keeps his distance from the field and the clubhouse, focusing on organizational business. His priority for now is not a lease extension — Angelos doesn’t like the word lease — but a “public-private partnership” that would reinvent the Camden Yards campus.
The plans, of course, would include the usual living, working and playing elements – residences, hotels, stores, restaurants, bars – that modern homeowners covet.
But Angelos mentioned several other possibilities: an elementary school located in the warehouse, a health and wellness clinic, internship and mentoring programs for area youth.
“People will talk about Baltimore and say, ‘Wow, Baltimore is cutting edge,’ that’s what they said about Camden Yards,” Angelos said. “If we develop it right and include this impactful community program module, we can change the entire brand of Baltimore.”
While Camden Yards has inspired a wave of stadium and arena construction designed to uplift surrounding local businesses (at least in theory), the Atlanta Braves complex, located in suburban Cobb County, Georgia, is the new normal. Instead of just profiting from ballpark sales, the Braves essentially built their own city — known as the Battery and opened in 2017 — to give them a stake in adjacent properties as well.
You see it everywhere: the San Francisco Giants developed the zone on the other side of McCovey Cove; the Boston Red Sox built a 5,000-seat concert hall at Fenway Park; The Chicago Cubs purchased several buildings that border Wrigley Field. But Atlanta is ideal, and Angelos visited the Braves complex with Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and stadium authority officials.
“The Braves have several things going for them,” Angelos said. “They did very well on the baseball side. They have a very large market, which helps a lot. And then they developed a whole other source of income, a whole other activity.
“And if big markets like Boston and Atlanta do this, it becomes existential: How are we going to compete and keep up? Not everyone will be able to do it. But I think because of what’s here – the mark of this ballpark, this roughly 60-acre parcel of property with other land around it that could be accessed, maybe bolted on, with public transportation which you don’t even have in Atlanta, with the major highway systems – we think it’s existential.
There are of course many details to untangle, but Angelos has a much better relationship with Moore than with the previous governor, Larry Hogan. A former official of this administration told the Baltimore Banner this month, negotiating with the Orioles was “like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall.”
Craig Thompson, chairman of the Maryland Stadium Authority, acknowledged in a statement that the discussions were “a priority for fans” and added: “Together with Governor Moore, MSA is committed to continuing to work in partnership with the Orioles from Baltimore to finalize a deal. agreement as soon as possible. »
Angelos said he was confident that an agreement could be reached before the Dec. 31 deadline and that the shared passion of government officials helped fuel his enthusiasm for the project.
But remember this word, existential, that is to say essential to the very existence of the franchise. And remember this too: while the Braves have nine players signed beyond 2024, the Orioles have none. They will not spend more without earning more.
“I don’t think you should take any losses,” Angelos said. “I think you should live within your means and your market.”
The Orioles’ $70 million payroll this season ranks 28th out of 30 teams. This is largely due to players’ lack of service time, which limits their ability to make money in baseball’s peculiar economy. Angelos has many qualms with this system: “The hardest thing to do in sports is to be a small-market baseball team and be competitive, because everything is against you – everything,” he said. -he declares. And he admitted it might not be possible for his popular young core to be career Orioles like Brooks Robinson, Jim Palmer and Cal Ripken Jr.
Without major changes, he only sees one way the team can retain all of its young stars.
“We’re going to have to raise prices here – dramatically,” he said.
This is certainly a well-known argument, but wouldn’t a company simply set prices based on market trends, regardless of expenses?
“Well, that’s a good question,” Angelos said. “But let’s say we sit down and show you the Orioles’ finances. You will quickly see that when people talk about giving $200 million to this player, to that player $150 million, we would be in such financial difficulty that we would have to raise prices massively. Now, will people come and pay for this? I don’t know if we’re at the limit, in your opinion. I don’t know if we are in balance between elasticity, supply and demand. Maybe we are. But in reality, it’s just one team. What I’m really trying to think about is the macro. »
Angelos offered a wide variety of theories on the economics of baseball – perhaps talking points for future collective bargaining with the union. But the current collective bargaining agreement runs through 2026, and it’s reasonable to wonder whether these Orioles will build a dynasty by then or break up.
For Angelos, the answer has to do with the fate of the rough deal. The future of Camden Yards is clearly a legacy for Angelos — but, he insisted, it’s also something more.
“It’s really about taking a whole new Baltimore and pushing it higher,” Angelos said. “But you need that leadership, you need collaboration between government and the private sector. I think we can really do something incredible. We are so well located. The community is diverse, robust and growing. We can do it. We just have to think big. We’ve done it before.
